Editorial pubs.acs.org/ac
The 2016 Annual Review Issue
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characterization, and the incipient concern of nanoparticle toxicity. Despite the impressive array of advances on display in this issue, our articles only capture a fraction of the developments in measurement science. Therefore, we will be back next year with more reviews.
he ready availability of information is empowering; however, sifting through all the information to find what is useful remains a difficult chore. Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than in science. Scientific knowledge grows ever faster creating many new opportunities; however, the explosive growth of scientific publishing makes it ever more difficult to keep up with trends in a science field like analytical chemistry or even rather narrow subdisciplines of the field. The large number of publications also creates a barrier to enter a field because of the daunting task of assimilating the available information. The many publications can make it difficult for a teacher to identify the most influential articles, especially as the subject becomes more removed from their expertise. If these problems resonate with you, then this issue is for you. We have invited more than 20 sets of authors to contribute an authoritative review on a technique or application area of interest to analytical chemistry. These mavens have distilled the activity in their fields into readable articles that will educate and update their readers. Many of the articles have distinctive tutorial sections that will enable one to learn much about the topic and give the new work context. The articles are presented at the beginning of the year, which for many is an ideal time to reflect on the changes in their discipline and research environment. The task for our authors was not easy. We asked that they limit their reviews to 250 articles to keep the reviews a reasonable length. This limit required substantial discretion in the choice of what articles to review. For example, according to Prof. Bowser, over 7 000 articles were published using capillary electrophoresis in the past 2 years alone so that less than 4% of the published articles could even be mentioned in their review. Choosing articles and then capturing the salient advances requires substantial time and expertise. For this, we are grateful to our authors. I hope you enjoy reading the reviews and take away inspiration for new research ideas and a sense of wonder at the ingenuity of your fellow scientists. Reading over the reviews one cannot help but be impressed with the growth and significance of analytical chemistry as a discipline. Techniques as established as potentiometry, luminescence, fiber optic sensors, and HPLC are seeing significant research activity and advances. Newer disciplines such as proteomics, phosphoproteomics, metabolomics, mass spectrometry imaging, and microfluidics are in rapid growth phases with exciting breakthroughs coming at a high rate. Emerging changes in technology for established methods such as dynamic nuclear polarization for NMR, activation methods for protein and peptide fragmentation for mass spectrometry, miniaturization of mass spectrometers, and nanoscale materials for electrochemistry show the ever-changing nature of instrumentation and its capabilities. It is also impressive to see that analytical chemists play a role on a bigger stage with important contributions to topics of societal and industrial significance such as doping analysis, water analysis, biopharmaceutical © 2016 American Chemical Society
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Robert T. Kennedy AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Special Issue: Fundamental and Applied Reviews in Analytical Chemistry 2016 Published: January 5, 2016 1
DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b04633 Anal. Chem. 2016, 88, 1−1
